Classical homeschooling in Southern California

A typical day, part 1

I thought it would be fun to do a day in our life type post. I’ve tried to do these before but always ended up failing because I was trying to be way to specific on times, writing notes, and trying to take a million pictures to document everything. Obviously, I didn’t do that this time around! You’ll notice a few photos here or there, but not many. And most of my times are very general. Still, it’s a good guide for how our days go. Most days are like this, with some variance depending on activities we have going on that day.

—————————————————————————————-

I wake up to a dog whining at the side of my bed at 6:30. Something in my brain resents the dog for waking me up before the children. Enough of me wakes up to realize the dog woke me up because he needs to go outside and if I ignore him I’ll regret it. Walking downstairs in the cool house, I let the dog out and enjoy the quiet I know that won’t last for long. My husband has already left for work. He, unlike me, is a morning person and enjoys how much work he gets done in the predawn hours when he is alone in the office.

As I come upstairs I debate getting back into bed, but it’s too late. I hear the baby stirring and when I walk into his room he’s standing at the corner of his crib closest to the door smiling at me. I take him to my bed for a little cuddle and nursing time. Every morning I’m still amazed that I finally have a baby who actually sleeps all night, in his own room. My older two never did that. I enjoy the extra quiet cuddles I get with my youngest because I know the day will get busier and he won’t get nearly as much attention later.

We come downstairs just before 7am and go into our little penned off area that contains my computer so I can check my emails and start to plan out my day before the older kids wake up. I normally plan our school week on Sundays but I didn’t this week due to illness so it’s been a morning of type of situation. This has been happening more often then I would like since the start of the new year and I need to get back in my habit of planning.

I made some coffee but forgot about it. The baby is fussy this morning and only wants to be cuddled. It’s not until 8am when my daughter wanders downstairs that I remember about it. I turn on PBS for her so she can cuddle up with her pink owl blanket a friend made her for Christmas and watch Curious George. She gets excited and points out funny parts to me. The baby is happy his sister is here to help entertain him so I’m able to get back to my computer. I like to think it’s because I’m planning, but I’m really just checking emails, facebook, and reading news articles. By 8:20am I can hear my oldest moving about upstairs but I know he won’t come down on his own for awhile. He’s like me and needs a lot of time in the morning to feel like himself. Since we homeschool and there’s no morning plans that will take us out of the house, I let him be and turn my mind to breakfast. My oldest makes meals difficult. He’s extremely picky about what he wants to eat, unlike the other two. While I like to think I have options, if I want him to actually eat a decent amount there’s really only one thing I can make. Pancakes for breakfast again.

By the time I sit down with my bowl of oatmeal, I just can’t do pancakes for myself again, my daughter is gone. She’s found her iPad and retreated to some corner of the house where I can’t see her. I let her go knowing she’s probably playing ABC mouse or some other learning game and when we start school I’ll take it away from her so she’ll have some screen free time.

My husband sends me a text to do a quick online errand for him so I quickly finish my oatmeal and jump on the computer leaving the boys at the table. I know if I don’t get it done right away the routine of our day will make me forget it completely. But the time I’m done all the kids are done and the baby is crying in his high chair because he wants down. 9am, it’s time for school!

We had to take a break with All About Reading Level 1 with my oldest. He was having some issues blending so, after some great advice from someone at All About Reading, we have gone back to the pre-level book and are working on specific phonemic awareness skills that he is struggling with. Because of that it’s been awhile since we reviewed any of our phoneme sounds so I pulled out all of our ‘mastered’ sounds and reviewed them quickly with him. Almost as soon as we sit down, my daughter has to go potty. I run her to the bathroom. While I was gone the baby got into my flashcard tin and pulled a lot of our cards out on the floor. I picked them up quickly and just set them on the desk. I had to start all over on the cards with my oldest since the piles I had were all mixed together now. There were a few he still knew immediately, but many that were forgotten so I put them in the review folder to go over every morning.

I could tell the baby was getting ready for his morning nap so I got my oldest started on his math work. I’m trying to encourage as much independent work as I can but I still need to sit near him to keep him on task and explain the directions since he isn’t reading yet. While he worked on the first page I organized all the cards and put them back in the tin in the right order. We just started shapes in our Singapore book and he was feeling comfortable so I left him to finish up the lesson while I put the baby down for a nap. Since he finished the lesson before I came back down he was able to have some free play time. I called him back and checked his math. At this point it is around 9:30. I gave him the handwriting without tears workbook we’re using. We’re near the end and only have a few pages left but he’s still not writing many letters the correct way every time so I’m going to have to make up practice pages for him to work on specific letters before we move into actual copywork.

When he was done with handwriting I pulled out some rhyming flashcards. I left them face up and had him find the 6 rhyming pairs we had. When we tried this lesson at the beginning of the year he couldn’t find a single one. We ended up skipping the rhyming games at that point because it was causing so many tears and frustration for him. I’m very encouraged coming back to it now that he’s been able to pick it up much easier. He managed to find all 6 pairs with minimal help from me. I think one more week of rhyming work and we might try and see how blending goes again. This didn’t take very long and we were able to finish both the handwriting and rhyming practice by 9:45.

Since the baby was still sleeping I let my oldest take the kinetic sand out for our read aloud time. He always does much better when he has something to play with and I’m finally able to judge what makes a good activity for him to do while still listening. He isn’t allowed to play with the sand when the baby is in the room with us for obvious mess related problems. He was really excited he finished all of his sit down work quickly today before the baby woke up from his nap. We read Mr. Popper’s Penguins, two chapters worth. He is loving this read aloud and laughs multiple times at the funny antics of the penguins. We haven’t seen the new Jim Carey movie yet but plan on renting it after we are done as a comparison between the two. Just watching the trailer I know they are very different. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine when a movie differs so much from the book as I know will be the case for this movie. I’m curious to see how much my oldest is able to pick up about the differences and if it bothers him as well.

My daughter ended up joining us for read aloud time as well. She doesn’t always, and I don’t make her, but she typically really likes the stories we read. She’s loving the penguins but I still think her favorite was Charlotte’s Web. She still pretends to be a pig a lot in her pretend play because of it. At some point my daughter stopped listening and was playing pretend in a movie theater with her Little People, I’m sure because the penguins at this point in our book were on tour in theaters across the country.

We also read the next chapter in our history book about ancient Athens and my oldest and I talked about the difference between Athens and Sparta. He’s decided he would rather live in Athens because he doesn’t want to fight. He’s a lover, not a fighter. I also read a book we had sitting around about birds for science today. We’re studying birds right now, although we haven’t gotten very far with it yet due to all our missed school days the last two weeks. My daughter ends up cuddling in my lap for the bird read aloud. She keeps pointing at all the birds she thinks are pretty. Her favorite is the flamingo, because it’s pink, until she sees the penguin. We’re a penguin loving family at the moment.

At this point it’s 11am and I give them free play time again. My daughter goes off to play with her princess barbies and my oldest asks to watch videos on his computer. I don’t normally let him on before 1pm but he was great today and we haven’t had any meltdowns, or even complaints. That’s pretty rare for us and I find it funny it happened on a day I decided to write out our day! I reward him and give him a half hour to watch a stampy cat video. I sit at my computer and write some more of this post up and get it all caught up to this point, amazed the baby has given me this long of a nap today as well.

11:20am I start working on lunch. We have speech therapy today so I want to make sure we have enough time to eat, get dressed, and walk over. I put some chicken nuggets in the oven to bake and went upstairs and finally got dressed and check on the baby. He’s still sleeping so I came back downstairs and fixed an apple to go with the nuggets. By the time I had all the plates ready to go the baby woke up just in time for lunch so we all sat down to eat. The kids begged me to tell them a story like I do almost every day at a meal time. They always start with “Once upon a time there was a Mommy, a Daddy, a big brother, a big sister, and a baby..” and usually end with “and they had a lot of fun!” Today’s story involved a dump truck full of sand and an adventure to the beach.

I hope you enjoyed reading about our day so far. Stay tuned for part two tomorrow!